So you’ve read all the introductory material and have
decided you’d like to keep using Django. We’ve only just scratched the surface
with this intro (in fact, if you’ve read every single word, you’ve read about
5% of the overall documentation).

So what’s next?

Well, we’ve always been big fans of learning by doing. At this point you should
know enough to start a project of your own and start fooling around. As you need
to learn new tricks, come back to the documentation.

We’ve put a lot of effort into making Django’s documentation useful, easy to
read and as complete as possible. The rest of this document explains more about
how the documentation works so that you can get the most out of it.

(Yes, this is documentation about documentation. Rest assured we have no plans
to write a document about how to read the document about documentation.)

Django’s main documentation is broken up into “chunks” designed to fill
different needs:

The introductory material is designed for people new
to Django – or to Web development in general. It doesn’t cover anything
in depth, but instead gives a high-level overview of how developing in
Django “feels”.

The guides and how-to’s don’t cover every single class, function, and
method available in Django – that would be overwhelming when you’re
trying to learn. Instead, details about individual classes, functions,
methods, and modules are kept in the reference. This is
where you’ll turn to find the details of a particular function or
whatever you need.

If you are interested in deploying a project for public use, our docs have
several guides for various deployment
setups as well as a deployment checklist
for some things you’ll need to think about.

The most recent version of the Django documentation lives at
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/. These HTML pages are generated
automatically from the text files in source control. That means they reflect the
“latest and greatest” in Django – they include the very latest corrections and
additions, and they discuss the latest Django features, which may only be
available to users of the Django development version. (See “Differences between
versions” below.)

We encourage you to help improve the docs by submitting changes, corrections and
suggestions in the ticket system. The Django developers actively monitor the
ticket system and use your feedback to improve the documentation for everybody.

Note, however, that tickets should explicitly relate to the documentation,
rather than asking broad tech-support questions. If you need help with your
particular Django setup, try the django-users mailing list or the #django
IRC channel instead.

For offline reading, or just for convenience, you can read the Django
documentation in plain text.

If you’re using an official release of Django, note that the zipped package
(tarball) of the code includes a docs/ directory, which contains all the
documentation for that release.

If you’re using the development version of Django (aka “trunk”), note that the
docs/ directory contains all of the documentation. You can update your
Git checkout to get the latest changes.

One low-tech way of taking advantage of the text documentation is by using the
Unix grep utility to search for a phrase in all of the documentation. For
example, this will show you each mention of the phrase “max_length” in any
Django document:

You can get a local copy of the HTML documentation following a few easy steps:

Django’s documentation uses a system called Sphinx to convert from
plain text to HTML. You’ll need to install Sphinx by either downloading
and installing the package from the Sphinx Web site, or with pip:

$ sudo pip install Sphinx

Then, just use the included Makefile to turn the documentation into
HTML:

As previously mentioned, the text documentation in our Git repository
contains the “latest and greatest” changes and additions. These changes often
include documentation of new features added in the Django development version
– the Git (“trunk”) version of Django. For that reason, it’s worth
pointing out our policy on keeping straight the documentation for various
versions of the framework.

We follow this policy:

The primary documentation on djangoproject.com is an HTML version of the
latest docs in Git. These docs always correspond to the latest
official Django release, plus whatever features we’ve added/changed in
the framework since the latest release.

As we add features to Django’s development version, we try to update the
documentation in the same Git commit transaction.

To distinguish feature changes/additions in the docs, we use the phrase:
“New in version X.Y”, being X.Y the next release version (hence, the one
being developed).

Documentation fixes and improvements may be backported to the last release
branch, at the discretion of the committer, however, once a version of
Django is no longer supported, that
version of the docs won’t get any further updates.

The main documentation Web page includes links to documentation for
all previous versions. Be sure you are using the version of the docs
corresponding to the version of Django you are using!